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Puppets, from sketches to animation

Puppets, from sketches to animation: Santa's helpers
Above : shown in a few shots only, raindeers as a group weren't of particular interest for me. I couldn't ignore them, though. So, I've let the construction lead me towards their design. I needed to achieve certain movements from their armatures, therefore I was constructing around joints. With size and weigh constrains in mind, I've tried to make them as small and light in weigh as possible. It was only when I managed to determine their size, that I was able to take the measure for the sled.
Above & right: Early Elf design. I decided not to use it, despite of needing 30 different elfs in one shot. At first, I've thought it'll be one the same at all work posts. That was a bit of a gamble, so next thing was having several elfs, some of them serving more than one post
Above: Sanja's first try on elfs; I used this as a reference

Below: I thought four of them will do (fifth head, on the right, is a boy, hence the normal ears). How naive I've been...

Above: Elfs are, just as kids, rather small puppets, at least comparatively to Santa and other adults.

Elfs are commited to their work, dead-serious, without expression on their faces or even blinking in general. But it's their hands that did most of the work. I've tried with more durable latex hands, but those couldn't achieve firm grip onto whatever they're about to hold. So I had to go with plasticine hands in most cases. This meant lots of remodeling, lots of replacement hands, etc, so I came up with quick solution, faster than casting from the rubber molds, which I didn't make in that size, anyway. I've prepared in advance set of hand molds for adults and another one for kids, but that size looked ridiculously small for Elfs. My "on-the-spot" solution was one sheet-plastic cut-out in form of hand, that works for both left and right hands, to produce plasticine copies in limitless quantities. The resulting hands were flat, and with all the fingers connected, so additional modelling was nevertheless required, but that wasn't as time consuming as it sounds.

So, after the first row of elfs done (in two camera passes, in each three elfs on every other "workpost", to provide space for animating), I found myself in trouble: I needed another three or four of them for the next row! I needed to produce more thorsos, more hands, more heads. New delay, but... shooting and animating one row in two passes takes forever, and by now I also felt encouraged to deal with all seven or eight of them for each frame (at 25fps).
Besides adding newcomers, I needed to change the old ones a bit, so they wouldn't be identic in every row. That kind of combinatorics took some time, but far less than producing 30 full elfs...
 
_1 The ARCTIC PIRATE index
_2 Color chart development, coloring and light tests
_3 Storyboards, shooting plans, concept arts, sketches
_4 Puppets, from sketches to animation :4-C - Santa's helpers
_5 Vehicles of all sorts
_6 Houses and exteriors, from sketches to final sets
_7 Interiors
_8 Small props
_9 Graphics and maps for posters, banners, press, signs etc.
10 Shots against all odds
11 Simple shots, confined spaces
12 Basics: workbenches, tools, logistics, etc.
13 Miscellaneous
 

 

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